Children in the Second World War by Amanda Herbert-Davies

Author:Amanda Herbert-Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Entertainment

All this!! Our ‘never a dull moment’ of plane spotting, bomb shrieking, gun blasting, refugee watching, toast making, fire engine and ambulance chasing, as well as troop cheering . . . All this!!

Charles Tyrrell

Role-play copies real life, and so it was the war that was the overriding theme of children’s games. In London, Brian, much to his parent’s concern, was ‘forever constructing buildings with bits of wood and then bombing them to destruction’. His parents were ‘dismayed at these warlike tendencies’ as their five-year-old ‘demolished yet another row of houses’. The games that John and his friends played nearly always involved weapons and fighting, and Donald in Bristol was keen on playing ‘dangerous games, simulating war’. The Cowboy and Indian toy figures that Betty and her brother had always played with lay neglected and forgotten. With the new, modern war around them they turned their attention instead to ‘violent and aggressive’ games with toy German soldiers. Some parents actively encouraged these warlike activities.

Entrepreneurial fathers provided their children with weapons created in the munitions depots of backyard sheds. John was especially pleased when his toolmaker father made him ‘a super Tommy gun’, and Iain was lucky enough to have an uncle who made a handmade realistic wooden Thompson submachine gun for him. Iain would have been the envy of his friends as he was also provided with a hand-carved ‘Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle with bayonet attached’. Nothing though was quite as likely to inspire awe as the real thing. Brian in Southampton had real ammunition at home as his father was in the Home Guard and kept ‘a live hand grenade under a bucket in the garden’. Brian was not allowed to play with that so he contented himself with a practice grenade: ‘I played with that a lot . . . I even took it to school.’ His father, unwilling to fulfil his son’s birthday wish for his very own personal grenade, instead gave his twelve-year-old a coveted Commando cosh suitable for close combat. So prized was this possession that Brian still had it sixty years later.

The war brought an unexpected bonanza of new play areas. Michael discovered that ‘in Beechen Cliff, off Holloway, one bombed site opened up an entrance into the extensive cave system in the hillside, which we explored with torches and candles’. This made for a novel playground as ‘there were caverns and underground waterfalls and some stone-lined tunnels leading to the ancient water supply. Bombs had collapsed some of these.’ Bomb sites provided new playgrounds for the intrepid. In Liverpool, one little boy was warned to keep away from these areas: ‘. . . my mother promised Hell and Damnation if I played in the bombed houses. They had been known to collapse at odd times after a raid, but they were our equivalent of an adventure playground.’ Sometimes it was the gruesome that appealed: ‘There was a rumour that one of the kids had found a foot shortly after a raid, you never knew your luck.

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